Saturday, January 16, 2016

Few European Babies Leads to Muslim Transformation

The modern culture in Europe is literally dying from a lack of offspring. To counter the inevitable, looming economic disaster, government planners see immigration as a solution.

"This is a very acute problem because for years Europe has been doing a sort of collective demographic suicide. . . . To change the demographic trends, promoting birth is not enough. It also has to be done through immigration."-- Vitor Constâncio, Vice President of the European Central Bank

"I have heard many times from Muslims that their goal is to conquer Europe with two weapons: faith and the birth rate."-- Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai

Based on UN population estimates, the number of people in the developed world aged between 16 and 64 peaked in 2010, while the number of people aged 60 and over will exceed the number of children for the first time in 2047, and more than double from 841m in 2013 to two billion by 2050.

. . . Birth rates have fallen from five per woman in 1950 to 2.5 today, and are expected to fall to between 1.8 and 2.2 by 2050.

As tax bases and revenues shrink and the number of retirees grows, governments face the choice of borrowing more or giving out less to ensure the numbers add up.

But without change, countries may find themselves sleepwalking into a new reality of permanently lower growth and higher debt.

Spain has one of the lowest fertility rates in the EU, with an average of 1.27 children born for every woman of childbearing age, compared to the EU average of 1.55. Its crippling economic crisis has seen a net exodus of people from the country, as hundreds of thousands of Spaniards and migrants leave in the hope of finding jobs abroad. The result is that, since 2012, Spain’s population has been shrinking.

Record numbers of economic migrants and asylum-seekers are seeking to enter the European Union this summer and are risking their lives in the attempt. The paradox is that as police and security forces battle to keep them at bay, a demographic crisis is unfolding across the continent. Europe desperately needs more young people to run its health services, populate its rural areas and look after its elderly because, increasingly, its societies are no longer self-sustaining.

In Portugal, the population has been shrinking since 2010. For many analysts, the question now is how low can it go, with projections by the National Statistics Institute suggesting Portugal’s population could drop from 10.5 million to 6.3 million by 2060. According to prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho: “We’ve got really serious problems.”

In Italy the retired population is soaring, with the proportion of over-65s set to rise from 2.7% last year to 18.8% in 2050. Germany has the lowest birthrate in the world: 8.2 per 1,000 population between 2008 and 2013, according to a recent study by the Hamburg-based world economy institute, the HWWI.

. . . Germany needs to welcome an average of 533,000 immigrants every year, which perhaps gives context to the estimate that 800,000 refugees are due to come to Germany this year.

Texas A&M Professor of Sociology Dudley Poston, along with Professor Kenneth Johnson, University of New Hampshire, and Professor Layton Field, Mount St. Mary's University, published their findings in Population and Development Review this month.

The researchers find that 17 European nations have more people dying in them than are being born (natural decrease), including three of Europe's more populous nations: Russia, Germany and Italy. In contrast, in the U.S. and in the state of Texas, births exceed deaths by a substantial margin.

Findings reveal that 58 percent of the 1,391 counties of Europe had more deaths than births compared to just 28 percent of the 3,141 counties of the U.S.

The researchers find that in Europe, deaths exceeded births in most of the counties of Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, as well as in Sweden and the Baltic States. Further south, natural decrease is found occurring in the majority of the counties of Greece, Portugal and Italy.

“Europe added the second largest number of international migrants between 2000 and 2015 (20 million, or 1.3 million per year),” the UN report stated. Of those, 75 percent were between the ages of 20 and 64.

But even with this large influx of working-age immigrants, “old-age dependency ratios are projected to increase from 26 to 48 per 100 in Europe” - compared to 38 per 100 in North America by 2050.

“Because international migrants tend to include a larger proportion of working-age persons compared to the overall population, positive net migration can contribute to reducing old-age dependency ratios. However, international migration cannot reverse, or halt, the long-term trend toward population ageing,” the UN report stated.

A 2012 analysis by the Guttmacher Institute found that about a third of all pregnancies in Europe between 1995 and 2003 ended in abortion. Birth rates below the replacement level (2.1 children per woman) have created a demographic crisis in which a declining population of young workers is expected to support a growing number of elderly retirees.

[Germany] has dropped below Japan to take the lowest birth rate globally, according to the study by the Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI), prompting fears that labour market shortages could damage the economy.

The authors of the study also said that women’s participation in the workforce would be key to the country’s economic future, and warned that a shrinking working-age population could have negative effects.

The falling birth rate means the percentage of people of working age in the country - between 20 and 65 - would drop from 61 per cent to 54 per cent by 2030.

Mr Probst said the country needed young immigrant workers to fill the significant skills gap . . .

In countries like Austria, Finland, Ireland, Kosovo, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Serbia and the United Kingdom, Muslims are already outpacing non-Muslim birthrates by more than a full percentage point. By 2030, Muslims likely would have made up 8 percent of the continent's population – hardly enough though to tilt the scales in favor of Islam.

That figure, however, will likely be significantly higher now since hundreds of thousands of migrants have flooded into countries like Germany and France. Some countries, such as Great Britain, have also made allowances for Muslim families where a man has multiple wives.

"The main reasons for Islam's growth ultimately involve simple demographics. To begin with, Muslims have more children than members of the seven other major religious groups analyzed in the study. Each Muslim woman has an average of 3.1 children, significantly above the next-highest group (Christians at 2.7) and the average of all non-Muslims (2.3). In all major regions where there is a sizable Muslim population, Muslim fertility exceeds non-Muslim fertility," Pew [Research Center] said in a recent study.

"The growth of the Muslim population also is helped by the fact that Muslims have the youngest median age (23 in 2010) of all major religious groups, seven years younger than the median age of non-Muslims (30). A larger share of Muslims will soon be at the point in their lives when people begin having children. This, combined with high fertility rates, will accelerate Muslim population growth," Pew also said.